The Graveyard Apartment – An Entertainingly Macabre Tale of a Haunted Housing Complex

When human beings are deprived of their normal freedom of movement, they need to latch onto any shred of hope. As long as there is some action to take or some solution to explore, even if those options ultimately come to naught, the mere illusion of possibility can keep people from tumbling into the abyss of despair.

Though I tend to read a lot of horror, I am nowadays tired of delving into the conventional ‘scary’ read. So I was wary about Mariko Koike’s The Graveyard Apartment which occupied a place in numerous lists referring to horror fiction in translation. The set-up as the title implies is very basic and familiar: a young family of three moves into a new apartment complex in Tokyo, which overlooks an ancient graveyard and situated next to a crematorium, and a Buddhist temple. Validating our expectations of an allegedly haunted place, things start going south with ceaseless occurrences of chilling unexplainable phenomena.

Horror fiction always makes a big thing about living near cemeteries. It makes an assumption that condos closer to graveyard won’t sell at all. Residential locations lying adjacent to cemetery are a common thing and people living there aren’t saddled with ‘spooky’ episodes. But if you could accept such presumptions or narrative underpinnings and picture in your mind the supposed spookiness of an old graveyard, this one would be a grimly fascinating and a leisurely read. What I liked about Graveyard Apartment is its slow-burn tone with a penchant for building psychological chills. Furthermore, I liked Koike’s decision to avoid explanations regarding the motivations of the demonic entities.

Originally published in 1986 (and translated to English by Deborah Boliver Boehm), Mariko Koike’s novel is set in 1987. The book opens with the death of Kano family’s pet finch. They dismiss it as bad luck, but having read numerous horror novels we know it’s just the first in a series of eerie occurrences. Husband Teppei is happy to own an apartment in the middle of Tokyo and closer to his office (an advertising firm), provided if they can perceive the graveyard as just a community park of sorts. Wife Misao has some reservations about the place but she is rejoiced to have a friendly neighbor of same age. Once their five-year old daughter Tamao is enrolled in the kindergarten, Misao is also hoping to start working from home.

Though Teppei and Misao looks like a ‘normal’ couple we gradually get to discern the skeletons in their closet. The guilt they carry over due to a grim event in the shared past show that the psychic wounds may open up if a boiling point is reached. The sparsely populated eight-storey Central Plaza Mansion with a sprawling basement space also withholds a supposedly darker past. Misao hears about a abandoned underground shopping plaza project. In fact, the only remainder about the shelved construction project is an underground road that runs through the graveyard into the building’s basement. Hence the terror starts unfolding from the basement which also comes with a structural flaw that doubles up as the perfect horror story-trope, i.e., the basement is only accessible by the elevator which breaks down at the most inopportune moments.

Despite the tad cliched escalation of haunting tactics (commencing with pet’s death and moving to dark figures in TV), Graveyard Apartment largely works due to the dynamics between Misao, Teppei, and Tamao. And the tension between the couple when subjected to supernatural occurrences is also organically developed. Moreover, the dark secret of the past plays a pivotal role in coloring the two central characters’ perceptions. The novel falters a bit in the middle and some of its elements do seem to have got lost in the translation. Yet the pacing and scary quotient picks up very well in the last-third.

Koike, mostly known for detective fiction, does a wonderful job in establishing the atmosphere of dread and high anxiety through suggestive horror. Eventually, we are left with an unsettling climax with no answers which I found to be immensely gratifying although the same may come across as disappointing for many horror fiction readers.  Overall, The Graveyard Apartment starts off as a typical poltergeist story but gets better due to its sufficiently creepy atmosphere and ambiguous horror elements.

Such Small Hands – A Terrifyingly Subliminal Tale of Trauma and Abandonment

“…We ambled awkwardly alongside Marina’s memory, always parallel, always tired, always hungry, but the urgency of our desire wasn’t enough to bring it to life and then we tired of trying, and desire turned to rage against that girl who seemed too old…

Last year when I read Argentinean author Samantha Schweblin’s novella Fever Dream I was haunted for days by its eerie, foreboding mood & the images and questions it evoked. It’s a surrealistic tale that’s part political & eco critique and part intimate study of broken souls. I am still at a loss of words to describe the feeling this unconventional yet dazzling short novel kindled within me which was exemplarily translated by Megan McDowell. Spanish author Andres Barba’s 2008 novella Such Small Hands also withholds such ferocious intensity, its perplexing tone mesmerizingly translated by Lisa Dillman. Such Small Hands is a journey into the creepy and incredibly complex inner world of orphaned children. Barba dismantles the typical societal notions of childhood innocence and purity to showcase how callousness and grim curiosity are also part of a child’s world, which is firmly rooted inside the traumatized and isolated kids characters of Barba.

Both Fever Dream and Such Small Hands take a genre story and make it a chilling experiment in literary form.  Edmund White in the afterword of Such Small Hands befittingly writes, “Every once in a while a novel does not record reality but creates a whole new reality, one that casts a light on our darkest feelings.” The novella pulls us into its grimly fascinating world through its focus on the minutiae and in the manner Barba inventively discerns the coarser emotions of traumatized children. On the outset, Such Small Hands tells a very simple tale of a seven-year old Marina who ends in an orphanage after suddenly losing her parents in an automobile accident. When Marina enters the orphanage, clutching her only source of comfort – a toy doll – she immediately becomes both an object of intrigue and an outcast.

Divided into three parts, each small chapters alternates between the perspective of Marina and the voice of other girls who all speak as one. Trapped in the claustrophobic world of orphaned children, we the readers become a doll as the children susurrate their darker inner most thoughts that forebode a tragic conclusion. When Marina realizes that she is ‘different’ (from the scar across the midriff to her quiet defiance while carrying out a hunger strike, Marina is doomed to not be a part of the ‘collective’) she seeks to wrest control from her tormentors by teaching them a game. Under Barba’s pristinely arranged prose, the intention and results profoundly unsettles us.

The overall events in Such Small Hands is said to be based on a chilling real-life incident that took place in Brazil in the 1960s. Girls in an orphanage at Rio de Janeiro killed a child and played with her body parts for a week. In the interview to Granta, Barba states that this episode had a powerful impact on him, “not because it is particularly sinister but because it seems to hide in its interior a story of love and fascination.” Consequently, Barba isn’t trying to chronicle the grim tale of killer kids, but deploys the written word to create a powerful mood and accesses the unconscious mind in a way that’s extremely complex and yet flows smoothly.  

Such Small Hands and Fever Dream (and I’m on the hunt for similar novellas) clearly can’t be reduced to its plot points. Its atmospheric creepiness can only be felt; the depiction of unforeseeable cruelties in a mundane reality which sets out to violently infiltrate our subconscious. As I mentioned earlier, Barba’s fascination with minutiae leads to grotesque as well as magical images. For instance, the trail of words used to describe the portentous act of severing the caterpillar which is juxtaposed with Marina talking to her psychologist. It remains as a testament to Barba’s power to transport us to unseen, darker dimensions within the everyday normality (which brings to mind the adjective ‘Lynchian’).

Overall, Such Small Hands is fiction at its most formidable and compelling. It explores beauty, vileness, pandemonium, and the complexities of violence existing at the various levels of seemingly simple world of children.

The Hot Zone – A Bit Out-Dated yet a Thrilling Account of a Lethal Virus

“We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.”

Richard Preston’s 1994 non-fiction book The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story covers the outbreaks of Ebola in Africa (a deadly virus) and the virus' alarming outbreak at a monkey-house in Reston, Virginia in 1989. Named as Ebola Reston, the new virus strain found in a US laboratory was eerily similar to Ebola Zaire, which was first reported in Congo in 1977 (and from 2014 has ravaged across West and Central Africa killing thousands of people). Unlike the other pernicious Ebola viruses, the Reston virus caused only asymptomatic infections and couldn't cause disease in humans. The Hot Zone was often praised for its gripping narrative, which at times reads like a chilling horror literature. Of course, since it’s a twenty-five year old book, some of its portions are clearly outdated. Epidemiologists have also found problems with Preston’s amplified writing style and the way he supposedly twists the true nature of Ebola to keep the readers ‘terrified’, keeping up with the promise presented in the book title (the book was adapted into a six-part miniseries this year by Nat Geo channel).

The first two chapters of The Hot Zone are brilliantly written; the visceral account of what Ebola does to human body was so disturbing and scary to read. Although some of Preston’s choice of words to describe the people dying of Ebola (‘liquefy’, ‘bleeding out’) were criticized to have stoked sensationalism and unfounded fears (about the disease), the riveting prose keeps us wholly engrossed (provided you don’t take Preston’s description as the only clinically accurate version). The Hot Zone was written at a time when the general public had no knowledge of Ebola virus (even the scientific community was then coming into grips about the emerging, extremely deadly viruses) and some of the big fears addressed here were allayed over the years (like Ebola was ‘possibly airborne’).

 At the same time, the criticisms laid out against Preston’s book, for instance that it totally exaggerated the dangerous of Ebola in humans, were found to be misconception after the 2014-2016 West African Outbreak, which killed over 11,000 people. The current Ebola epidemic in Central Africa (particularly in Congo) that was first declared on August 1, 2018 has resulted in 1,700 deaths and counting. The vaccination and treatment efforts of the selfless doctors in Africa are also thwarted by the military conflicts in the region and the continent's lesser-developed healthcare system.

The Hot Zone has the undeniable quality of creeping us out (“Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles”). Although the origin of Ebola virus is still a mystery, Preston kicks up the scare factor by focusing a lot on the Kitum cave (in Mount Elgon National Park, Kenya). The author’s description of the place makes it seem preternatural, where invisible, primitive enemies are waiting to wreak havoc on the entire human race. Even Preston’s own journey into Kitum cave doesn’t reveal anything about Ebola. Similar to the vivid chronicle of Ebola symptoms in Charles Monet and Nurse Mayinga, the peek inside Kitum cave simply contains the power to terrify the readers, but adds nothing much from a scientific perspective.

Preston brings a much-needed interesting subtext into his ‘thrilling’ narrative late in the book, when he talks of deforestation of tropical rain forests and the aftermath of AIDS epidemic. “In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not 'like' the idea of five billion humans”, writes Preston, contextualizing how the rapidly enlarging host of deadly viruses is linked to human’s adversarial impact on environment.

Having finished The Hot Zone, I have now started to read David Quammen’s 2014 book ‘Ebola: the Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus’, which is said to be toned down and less dramatic than Preston’s book. Also, I am interested in reading Richard Preston’s updated follow-up to his 1994 book, Crisis in the Red Zone (published July 2019). 

 

The Cipher – A Challenging and Incredibly Bizarre Horror

“…what if it is me? What if somehow I’m crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as hellhole, to roil in the aching dark of my own emptiness forever?”

American author Kathe Koja’s The Cipher (1991) was part of, or you could say it spear-headed, the bunch of weird horror fiction that emerged in the early 1990s (published by Dell Publishing under the print of Abyss Books). The paperback original horrors appeared under ‘Abyss’ were considered to be antithetical to the main-stream horror fiction of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, VC Andrews, etc (Mr. King however praised the titles published under the Abyss Books). The weird horror authors (mostly unknown), who gravitated towards hallucinatory prose and existential tension, penned stories that elude easy categorization. Readers who feel gross-out horror are not their cup of tea would have a particularly hard time going through this line of books.

Koja’s The Cipher actually doesn’t have a heavy dose of yuckiness as some of the splatter-punk horror genre novels of the 1980s. Yet Koja’s unpolished and relentlessly bleak prose makes us squirm with unease. The horrific phenomenon at the center of The Cipher is unexplainable. It’s a black hole, I mean literally. The novel’s characters aren’t the clean, all-American suburbanites, but disaffected young slackers, plagued with fear and anxiety, and living in an exceedingly dirty tenement. The book opens with Nicholas, a wanna-be poet and video-store clerk cajoled by Nakota, the bitchy wanna-be artist stuck in the shitty job of waitressing, to visit the mysterious hole in the storage closet of Nicholas’ broken-down apartment building. Nakota aka Shirke is cunning and manipulative, but Nicholas deeply loves her, knowing very well that his love may never be reciprocated. He knows she wouldn’t do be anywhere near him if not for that hole.

Nicholas describes the hole as, “Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more.” Nakota names it ‘Funhole’ and it becomes the focus of her obsession, just as Nicholas is obsessed with Nakota. She wants to find out the reason for the hole’s existence or what it can do. She experiments with a jar of insects, throwing it down the black hole, only to discover the strange mutations before its death. She sends a mouse inside, witnessing the grim results. Finally, Nakota pressures Nicholas to borrow a camcorder from the video store. She lowers the camcorder and gets a recording which is quite psychedelic. Nakota can’t stop watching the video, and the ensuing confrontation with Nicholas results in Nicholas accidentally dipping his hand in the Funhole. And things turn weirder when Nakota unveils the strangely symbiotic relationship between Nicholas and the hole.

The Cipher contains what critics call ‘stream of conscious writing’, which is full of mordant sense of humor (“If I could have broken his neck I would have, just for the pleasure of the silence after the snap”) and detailed description of all things unclean and unsavory. The novel actually fascinated me for the way Koja conjures the implacable climate of unpleasantness. The author makes us strongly feel the mood of decay and smell the odors, possibly emanating from the Funhole. There are lots of fiery verbal exchanges which some times turn violent. The sexual acts are described in as much joyless (and queasy) manner as possible. Although Nicholas is not a very likeable character, you could feel his desperation as he crawls between the claustrophobic spaces, hungering for love and preparing for that inevitable doom. The novel does feel too long, especially in the episodes related to Nakota & Malcolm’s gang of agitators. And Nakota was not only an unlikable character, but remains a cipher throughout (described as the woman with ‘a special selfishness that can barely recognize the existence of others’). Nevertheless, this tale of ‘evil space’ is a smart allegory on obsession, unrequited love, human frailty and the emptiness of modern life.

 

The Winter People – A Page-Turning Supernatural Thriller

Jennifer McMahon’s chilling novel, The Winter People (2013) is set in the eerie small-town of West Hall, Vermont, surrounded by dark woods and a source of weird folk tales. The collective psyche of the town’s inhabitants believes in vengeful ghosts and unexplainable monsters roaming around the creepy atmosphere of forests. And like every small-town we read about in novels, strangers rarely trespass the territory while the townspeople pass of their knowledge and sense of dread to the dwindling populace of descendants. Of course, teenagers rebel and question the elders’ belief in such ridiculous fairy-tales. It leads to unveiling the truth, which only further leads to discerning the necessity of maintaining the dark secret. The Winter People follows this basic structure, a Stephen King-like story that alternates between the past and present to explore the town’s legend of ‘sleepers’.

“The first time I saw a sleeper, I was nine years old,” writes Sara in her diary, one of the grieving heroines of the novel. The ‘sleeper’ or ‘Winter People’, as named by Sara’s little daughter Gertie, are people who have been recalled from the dead by their beloved ones. And we inherently know nothing good can come from awakening the dead. Sara Harrison Shea’s story is set in the year 1908. She lives in her remote farmhouse (which belonged to her deceased father) with her husband Martin, and six-year-old daughter Gertie. Gertie was born after many years of failed pregnancies and loss. Sadly, the little girl too perishes in an accident and madness seems to have taken hold of Sara. In order to get her daughter back, Sara performs a ritual, the knowledge of it passed on to her by a mysterious aunt. Soon, she believes her girl has come back, whispering to her, and leaving strange notes.

In the present, Nineteen-year-old Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that her mother, Alice has disappeared. For years, Ruthie and her little sister Fawn are living off-the-grid with their mother. In her search for clues to find her mother’s whereabouts, Ruthie stumbles upon Sara Harrison Shea’s diary (actually it’s published into a book by Sara’s niece Amelia years after her aunt’s grim fate; people read it as a good horror story, although Amelia believed it to be true and adjudges that some of the diary’s ‘important’ pages are missing). Ruthie also comes across other mysterious items in her mom’s closet which pushes her to take a short trip with boyfriend Buzz. In a parallel story, also set in the present, a grieving wife and artist named Katherine has recently moved to West Hall. Her photographer husband, Gary is recently killed in a car accident, supposedly shooting for a wedding. But she discovers there was no wedding and learns that Gary visited a woman in a café in West Hall. Katherine is desperate to understand the reason for her husband's visit. These two stories in the present are of course connected to the strange life and death of Sara Harrison.

The first-half of ‘Winter People’ is really absorbing, transplanting us to the snow-covered small-town Vermont setting. The construction and execution of atmospheric horror in the early chapters is beyond excellent. The description of wintry woods, the arduous farm-life, the pale ghostly figure spotted between tree trunks, tales of  people disappearing without a trace, and all other chilling elements are superbly built up by Jennifer McMahon. Sara’s tale is full of dark foreboding and heart-breaking developments, and it’s easily the best among the three story-lines. The novel’s major themes deal with mother-daughter relationship which is well-realized in both the timelines plus the hold grief has over the humans. The characters are also very well developed (especially Ruthie Sara, and Katherine). Moreover, the clues and red-herrings deeply engages us. However, the novel sort of implodes in the last-third, as guns are brought into play. I particularly abhorred the Candace character whose actions and behavior are jarring enough to adversely impact the novel’s tone. The interactions also become very stiff in these parts, sounding too formulaic. The conclusion was also not convincing, and all these factors considerably bring down the novel’s quality (because the first-half was so propulsive). Still, it will be a captivating page-turner for mystery and thriller aficionados.